Monday, March 12, 2012

Don’t call these guys rats.
Not the mobster who whacked himself after wearing a wire for the feds and agreeing to testify against his former cronies.
And not the guy whom he allegedly killed for dropping a dime on him in the first place.
The daughter of Nicholas “Nicky Skins” Stefanelli, the mobster, insisted to The Post that her pop was far from a canary.
“He was no rat. He killed himself to spare all his friends and their families [a trial] . . . My father didn’t kill himself out of guilt. He killed himself not to take the stand,” Francine Stefanelli said.

STEFANELLI Killed stoolie, then self.

She asserted that her dad was lying to authorities to steer them off track.
“He led the FBI on,” Stefanelli said. “He led them to believe he was going to [testify]. But . . . he was never going to do it. That’s what his death was all about. My father would never have taken that stand. He was too loyal.”
But the feds say that’s baloney.
“If it was a double-cross [of the FBI], [Nicky Skins] didn’t do a very good job,” one source told The Post. “The [wiretaps] he made are good.”
The source said Francine is just trying to save her dad’s “rep” in “the family” now that he’s dead.
“He got [the feds] a good volume of stuff,” the source said.
Nicky Skins was found dead of suicide in a Rutherford, NJ, hotel room after turning rat for the feds against such mob cronies as crime bosses in Philadelphia and New England, sources said.
But two days before his death, Nicky Skins had some unfinished business to take care of, they said.
He killed video-game peddler Joseph Rossi Sr., whom he held responsible for his 2010 drug arrest, which forced Stefanelli to turn stool pigeon, the sources said.
Rossi was shot dead Feb. 24 in his Bloomfield, NJ, business, authorities said.
But Rossi was no rat, either, said a source close to the victim’s family.
The source said Rossi didn’t have anything on Stefanelli and was killed in a shakedown for money that had nothing to do with revenge.
“Joe was tough — he definitely resisted’’ the shakedown, and that’s why he was shot, the source said.
But a fed source scoffed, “[Rossi] was the guy that got Nicky jammed up in the first place, and [Nicky] was paying him back.”